Monday 22nd June 2020
So on goes the saga of the jazz band film clip.
I filmed the drummer Michael Evans-Barker in the middle of the road at this location called Bo Peep , a flat lonely stretch of road outside Ballarat perfect for our filming needs.
Only need to film the bass player I thought, and then I can edit it and ‘knock this on the head’ , so to speak.
There has been something strange about editing this particular project, no matter whatever I’d tried, the images were stuttering slow.
I finally realised that the main constant sequence in the clip is a stretched out TIFF files of extreme high quality ( about 140 mB per frame) , meaning that track alone is about 3,500 mB per second ( much ,much larger than the average film footage) , as well as the fact it’s panning constantly across the image , sometimes up 1,500 percent into the image, thus requiring a lot of extra processing from my computer.
Soooo, when I tried to make a rendered .mov sequence to save the load on my poor old computer it produced a 30Gb movie file before filling up my hard drive - just for that track! (a bit like having seven DVDs on one track).
Meaning, I’m still not understanding something fundamental about film editing and have cheerfully led myself into a bear trap.
What is more significant during this time, has been that I have had to, as I’ve said previously, to step back from this gargantuan task and keep a balance with the rest of my life.
This has , in the end, served me well and kept me sane.
In amongst all this , I’ve experienced the wonderful gift of little moments of inspiration.
It has felt that these moments occurred for no reason other than I did nothing more than allow some space for them to happen.
The most significant creative ‘visitation’ was during a mid evening ‘munchies’ session of cracker biscuits, prior to going to bed.
A song leapt into my head , as if attacking me from behind and demanding that I write it down. Two hours later I had most of a song.
Now that smaller creation is being honed along side the film clip and I intend to video record it, in simple form- acoustic guitar and vocals.
The song feels be something a very concise , relevant summation of my current spirtual thoughts and experiences.
It feels almost like it is a conscious being , that is saying to me –“this has become important in this little sliver of time, don’t worry about the film being completed, it will happen in due time”.
The song is called ‘If the World’ and will appear on this website soon,
I look forward to sharing it,
cheers,
Michael.